My unorthodox musings on science, religion and society

In early March 2016 I promised all of you that I would start blogging more. In late March 2016 my wife and I became parents. Needless to say, I couldn’t live up to my promise. All newborns can be stressful and cause you to lose sleep. Our situation was probably more stressful than most. We had just completed our foster parent certification and figured we’d have several months before we got called for a placement. Boy were we wrong.

Just a few days after we got certified our support worker asked us if we wanted to take home four-day (yes, day) old Gavin. We had a few hours to decide. We said yes, and the rest is history. If you’re interested, we’ll be writing about our experience as foster parents at the Gift of Gav. God willing, we’ll adopt him in a few months.

And then last November my wife gave birth to our daughter. So you could say I’ve had a whirlwind couple years.

To make a political decision, you sort through the evidence to find the facts that are most relevant to the issue—and “relevant,” please note, is a value judgement, not a simple matter of fact. Using the relevant evidence as a framework, you weigh competing values against one another—this also involves a value judgment—and then you weigh competing interests against one another, and look for a compromise on which most of the contending parties can more or less agree. If no such compromise can be found, in a democratic society, you put it to a vote and do what the majority says. That’s how politics is done; we might even call it the political method.

That’s not how science is done, though. The scientific method is a way of finding out which statements about nature are false and discarding them, under the not unreasonable assumption that you’ll be left with a set of statements about nature that are as close as possible to the truth. That process rules out compromise. If you’re Lavoisier and you’re trying to figure out how combustion works, you don’t say, hey, here’s the oxygenation theory and there’s the phlogiston theory, let’s agree that half of combustion happens one way and the other half the other; you work out an experiment that will disprove one of them, and accept its verdict. What’s inadmissible in science, though, is the heart of competent politics.

I love the term political reasoning. I’ll try expand on it in an upcoming post.

Happy summer folks! I’m trying to resume blogging after the big move. There’s still much to unpack…but I’m relaxed enough to start focusing on my writing again. With that, here’s a nice quote from a recent Slate essay on how much it would suck to have a country ruled by science:

My work with creationists shows how impossible it is for humans to behave rationally. We are always informed by our biases. For example, a careful analysis of creationists’ scientific knowledge shows they know as much science as anyone else. It’s just that they deny scientific claims. In my fieldwork in one creationist evangelical high school, I found students perfectly capable of answering correctly every question about evolution in their AP Biology exam. They simply used phrases like scientists believe in their answers so as not to betray their creationist bona fides. This is actually an extremely rational way for them to handle the discrepancy between their faith and mainstream science.

Hello readers. I know you’re used to long absences from me. But I still feel compelled to apologize and explain. My wife and I decided to take the plunge and buy our first house. So we’ve been busy figuring out this crazy world, and planning our move. You can say we’re movin’ on up.